Not much is yet reported outside the Sinological world, but the revolution in our understanding of ancient received texts triggered by the Chinese tomb texts discoveries is further broadening-- and will eventually impact all of ancient philology, in India and Greece no less than China, as predicted on this List long ago. Much of the discussion over the last year has resolved around the work of Michael Hunter at Yale, whose 2012 Princeton dissertation, grounded in recent tomb text discoveries, further questioned the historicity of Confucius and the supposed Warring States origins of the Lunyu (Analects). I havent yet gotten hold of Hunters 2012 Princeton dissertation, Sayings of Confucius, Deselected dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp01v692t624c -- if anyone has an electronic copy, please send it on! -- but suggestions of what Hunter and others (including his dissertation adviser, Martin Kern) are saying is suggested in various abstracts on the Net, including this one from a talk at Harvard last year: fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/event/michael-hunter (plain text version below) See also Hunters webpage at Yale eall.yale.edu/people/michael-hunter Does anyone know of anything more substantial from Hunter online, or relevant to this work? Philology ten years from now all across Eurasia is going to look very different due to the tomb text discoveries, as soon as discussion of it goes beyond the Sinologists. Steve *** Monday, November 12, 2012, 4:00pm Why the Confucian Analects Is Not as Old as We Might Think Michael Hunter, Yale University The Analects (Lunyu 論語) The Analects is widely considered to be the earliest Warring States (475–221 BCE) text, the earliest work of Chinese philosophy, and thus the one text that all subsequent Chinese authors must have responded to in some way or another. However, careful attention to the diversity and distribution of Confucius sayings across the early corpus shows that The Analects did not always dominate early authors thinking about Confucius. In this talk, Professor Hunter will outline the case against the traditional view of The Analects to argue that it is a product of the early Western Han era (202 BCE–9 CE) at the earliest, roughly three centuries later than is usually supposed. This revised picture has far-reaching implications for our understanding of Confucius and of early Chinese intellectual history. Michael Hunter is an assistant professor in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale University. His current research project, Sayings of Confucius, Deselected, is an effort to rethink the history of early Chinese thought through the corpus of early Confucius sayings. Professor Hunter received his MA in advanced Japanese in 2006 from Sheffield University and his PhD in East Asian studies in 2012 from Princeton University. Professor Hunter is coeditor with Martin Kern and Oliver Weingarten on a work in progress titled “The Analects: A Western Han Text?” __._,_.___ Courtesy: Dr Steve Farmer
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 03:03:27 +0000
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